referred to above and published just before Pamela.  It is “reported” of course, instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.  Here again that process of “vivification,” which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress—­the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply.  Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice can supply.  Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable touch in which, when the “reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries” are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time) suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving them an inn to keep—­Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, “This would not look like very heavy punishment to poor John?” She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course, but only “as a Christian”—­as a greater than Richardson put it afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.

The original admirers of Pamela, then, were certainly justified:  and even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed into a reasonable key.  But we ought nowadays to consider this first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive merits or defects which it shows in its author.

The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course, the letter-form.  More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps, than about some other points in the inquiry.  The initial difficulty of fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is the question, “What does all this mean?” “What is the authority?” “How does the author know it all?” And a hundred critics have pointed out that there are practically only three ways of meeting this.  The boldest and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves; to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass on, secure of safety, to tell your story “from the blue,” as if it were an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of the reader.  But at that time few novelists had